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Transform Windows Home Server Vail Into a Media Center, Part 6

By on June 17, 2010 in News, Software, TV, Video, WHS v2, windows 7, Windows Home Server, Windows Home Server Vail, Windows Media Center

If you check the WGS blog on any kind of a regular basis, I would assume you have taken a look at some of the earlier parts of this series.  Part 5 is basically a wrap up of what is contained in the previous parts plus one potential solution for recording TV.

I have pretty much documented the complete transformation with the exception of one major component.  Everything I have done to date is somewhat pointless if I cannot actually make use of Windows Media Center to serve all this data.  So it is now time to see what can or cannot be done with a virtual Windows Media Center.

To check the “what can or cannot be done”, I first copied several files from my WHS v1 machine to my Vail machine.  Some

  • pictures
  • music
  • Recorded TV
  • videos
  • movies

Next I setup WMC on my Vail VM and on my workstation to both read the same Vail shared folders.  Which is what I have documented below.

Music: Vail VM / Workstation

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Pictures: Vail VM / Workstation

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Videos: Vail VM / Workstation

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Recorded TV: Vail VM / Workstation

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Movies: Vail VM / Workstation

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About Jim Clark

Hello. I’m from the heartland of the U.S. Lots of corn and beans, although Iowa is a lot more than just farmland. It also has a few computer enthusiasts (no, not me!). I’ve been around PCs since I got my 1st PC XT aloooong time ago. WGS is one of the first sites I found centered around WHS. And the best. Every once in awhile, I do get away from the KB and enjoy time with and my wife and our 4 kids. And I do have a day job.
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  • http://twitter.com/tmservo @tmservo

    I've never found a USB tuner that works. Silicondust network tuner, however, works flawlessly.

  • Patrick Beau

    You should be able to use Tuners with the use of DVBLogic TVSource on the host. As this, you'll be able to send tuners' data throught the host-to-vm lan and to catch it on the Windows 7 virtualized host.

    I'm on a such configuration with a Windows 2008 R2 Hyper-v'ed host that is my sandbox for VMs, and the TV signal is sent to another computer which is the mediaplayer (no xbox for me, only old computer that run on win7).

  • guest

    The AnySee DVB-C USB Tuner work in a Windows 7 VM. Although not tried this in on Vail, but as Win7 VM on a Win7 host OS.

  • Wilkes

    Just curious on the VM access to the Vail server media. Where you have it defined as \ServerMusic as a example… Wouldn't this use network bandwidth to access the media on the Vail server from the VM? I was thinking you could define the media folders on Vail as shared folders on the VM. Then map the folders as drives from the VM OS. IE; V: for video, M: for music, etc. Then in the VM OS Media center set these mapped drives to be included. Seems like this would eliminate network traffic to get media from the Vail host the the Media Center virtual machine. I was wondering if this might eliminate the stutter problem you mentioned on watching one of the videos?

    • http://intensedebate.com/people/Jim_Clark Jim_Clark

      It is hard to say how that would work. I would *hope* that VMware is smart enough to directly feed data back and forth without going through the LAN, but I could be wrong. If not, then mapping drives should not effect throughput one way or the other, as the OS's would think they reside on separate machines with the resultant communication over the LAN.

      I suppose I could (and should) do some testing, but at this point, I would like to not think about VM's, WMC and Vail for awhile. You could say I all VM'd out! ;)

      • Wilkes

        Part 1

        All I can say is THANKS for all the effort you've put into this "little" experiment to get a "media center" working in Vail! I really have been following your crusade closely from the beginning knowing it will save me a TON of work when Vail actually happens. I can understand and sympathize with you being "VM'd out"!

        I wasn't sure which VM product you were using these days, I knew you had tried VirtualBox when you were working on getting the USB tuner working. I do know that the VirtualBox VM does NOT use network resources when you define shared folders on the host to the VM and then access them from the guest machine running in the VM as long as you have installed the Guest Additions. Here's the info from VirtualBox doc…

      • Wilkes

        Part 2

        "Shared folders must physically reside on the host and are then shared with the guest; sharing is accomplished using a special service on the host and a file system driver for the guest, both of which are provided by VirtualBox. For Windows guests, shared folders are implemented as a pseudo-network redirector; for Linux and Solaris guests, the Guest Additions provide a virtual filesystem driver which handles communication with the host."

        What this tells me (at least in VirtualBox) is that if you don't set up the shared folders on the host to the VM for access by the guest you will be using network resources (bandwidth) to share the folders. It seems that any VM product would work this way because without pre-defining the host folder(s) to be shared to the VM, the VM would just treat the \serverfolder as any other network resource.

  • Steve

    Great article. Why not install Win 7 MCE natively and run Vail in the VM?